Bibliography and the Book Trades

Studies in the Print Culture of Early New England

Hugh Amory. Edited by David D. Hall

Publication Year: 2011

Hugh Amory (1930-2001) was at once the most rigorous and the most methodologically sophisticated historian of the book in early America. Gathered here are his essays, articles, and lectures on the subject, two of them printed for the first time. An introduction by David D. Hall sets this work in context and indicates its significance; Hall has also provided headnotes for each of the essays.

Amory used his training as a bibliographer to reexamine every major question about printing, bookmaking, and reading in early New England. Who owned Bibles, and in what formats? Did the colonial book trade consist of books imported from Europe or of local production? Can we go behind the iconic status of the Bay Psalm Book to recover its actual history? Was Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom really a bestseller? And why did an Indian gravesite contain a scrap of Psalm 98 in a medicine bundle buried with a young Pequot girl?

In answering these and other questions, Amory writes broadly about the social and economic history of printing, bookselling and book ownership. At the heart of his work is a determination to connect the materialities of printed books with the workings of the book trades and, in turn, with how printed books were put to use. This is a collection of great methodological importance for anyone interested in literature and history who wants to make those same connections.

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Short Title List

Introduction

The essays that are gathered together in Bibliography and the Book Trades
describe the book culture of early New England and especially the artisans,
merchants, and patrons who animated this culture, be it by arranging for
books to be printed, imported, and distributed or by transforming copy into
printed and (sometimes) bound books, broadsides, and ephemera. ...

1. The Trout and the Milk: An Ethnobibliographical Essay

"I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts," Ralph
Waldo Emerson remarked in his homage to Henry David Thoreau, "not only as
records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and literary
excellence." The very first of these sentences is the source of the metaphors of the trout and the milk that Hugh appropriated ...

Like the "The Trout and the Milk," this essay on the Bay Psalm Book is animated
by Amory's unhappiness with some of the implications of the New Bibliography.
Aiming his fire at the notion of an ideal or "iconic" text, he used the variations
among six surviving first editions of the Bay Psalm Book to demonstrate that
changes were constantly being introduced ...

3. "A Bible and Other Books": Enumerating the Copies in Seventeenth-Century Essex County

"Ubiquitous in the personal libraries of New Englanders, yet rare in their institutional
libraries, and entirely absent from our national retrospective bibliography
before 1775, the Bible occupies a problematic position in the history of the
American book." The ironies of this sentence (ironies, however, that ignore the
publication of German-language Bibles in the colonies) ...

4. Under the Exchange: The Unprofitable Business of Michael Perry, a Seventeenth-Century Boston Bookseller

The inventory of Michael Perry's bookstore that was taken after Perry's death in
Boston in 1700 has been widely cited by historians. But until Amory studied it
closely, no one had fully understood what this text tells us about trade practices
at the end of the seventeenth century. ...

5. Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638-1713

"Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638-1713" draws on the three
essays that precede it in this collection, incorporating their arguments and discoveries
into a narrative that fits within the organization of The Colonial Book in
the Atlantic World, where it was originally printed, somewhat abridged, as chapter
three. ...

6. A Boston Society Library: The Old South Church and Thomas Prince

Published here for the first time, this essay describes the eighteenth-century antiquarian
and bibliophile Thomas Prince (1687-1758) and how he acquired the
books that became the "New England Library." One purpose of the essay is to
clarify the difference between that collection and others which have often been
confused with it, ...

7. A Note on Statistics, or, what do Our Imprint Bibliographies Mean by "Book"?

As The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World was being prepared, the question arose
of how best to indicate the quantitative aspects of the book trade in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. We had at our disposal a recently created
machine-readable catalogue, the North American Imprint Projects (NAIP, for
short) located at the American Antiquarian Society. ...

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